Barely three months after its flashy demo, Google’s enhanced voice search for iOS is finally here. According to Tuesday’s Google Blog post, the latest voice search functionality aims to better recognize the circumstances and intent of your searches while providing “the comprehensive Google search results you know and love.”
“When you have a question, finding the answer should be effortless–wherever you are and whatever device you are using,” says Google Search engineer Kenneth Bongort. “The new Google Search app for iPhone and iPad helps you to do just that with enhanced voice search that answers any question with the comprehensive Google search results you know and love.”
Admittedly, the service, which merely imitates some of the functionality found in Google’s search technology built into Android as part of Jelly Bean, aims to keep Siri on her toes. Indeed, some of the provided examples (along with the promotional video, embedded below) exhibits Google’s voice search presenting better results for certain kinds of requests–such as “what does Yankee Stadium look like?”–than Siri does for those same requests.
But for some others, such as “when does daylight saving time end,” or “who is in the cast of The Office,” it appears that Siri could provide those same answers just as easily.
Among other things, the software (iTunes) provides contextual, spoken results for voice queries as well as serves up Web searches for everything else. However, if you are in love with Siri’s voice responses, you might find this app missing. Here all results come in Google’s familiar list format; they are not read back to you.
Furthermore, if you still find yourself using the Google Search app often, it might be more convenient for you to continue using it when it comes to voice searches. The downside to trying to switch to this app over Siri is that Siri can do certain things on your iOS device, like creating reminders or appointments, that a third-party app cannot. But as we noted in August, Google’s enhanced voice search within iOS is largely the same as what it offers for Android (at least under Jelly Bean), so Google may be gunning to convert a few users in any way it can.
If you would like to try it out for yourself, the app is available now, for free.
Below is Google’s promotional video of the enhanced voice search in action:
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